Eric Portner has been developing software at IBM Lotus since he joined the company in 1994. During that time he has worked on many different projects including Lotus Components, IBM WebSphere® Portal, Lotus Workplace Messaging, and the Common PIM Portlets (CPP). Eric is currently an architect on the Lotus iNotes development team responsible for the iNotes ultra-light mode.

Vinod Seraphin is a Senior Technical Staff Member and lead architect for Lotus iNotes, which was "born" from Vinod's prototyping efforts to develop a compelling personal information manager (PIM) within a browser. He has been with IBM since 1991. Prior to working with Lotus Domino Web Access, Vinod was the Software Architect for Lotus Organizer®.

Janet Farrell joined IBM in 1981. She worked on Web services and autonomic computing development before joining the IBM Lotus Notes team. She is currently a member of the Lotus iNotes test team responsible for testing Lotus iNotes ultra-light mode.

Although Lotus iNotes ultra-light mode first premiered in IBM Lotus Domino®
8.0.2, the feature was developed concurrently for both the 8.5 and 8.0.2
versions. The 8.5 release, because it shipped after 8.0.2, has additional
capability that is not in the 8.0.2 version, including name validation and
expansion, reading of encrypted messages, display of additional view
indicators, and support for Mozilla Firefox as a desktop browser to
provide a solution for users with disabilities.

Ultra-light mode

The Apple iPhone introduced many innovative new capabilities within a
handheld device that easily fits in one's pocket. The most interesting
aspect, though, from our perspective is the inclusion of a powerful
browser: mobile Safari. This browser is nearly identical to its desktop
cousin and, having such a capable browser on a device that fits in one’s
pocket, changes the game. Suddenly, the rich content on the Internet is
readily reachable without having to carry around a bulky laptop. If other
Internet applications and sites are now available from these devices, one
would also expect one’s browser-based mail to be available. Why would
someone choose to use a separate public kiosk, if their private phone
provides comparable capability?

As we explored having Lotus iNotes work well on the iPhone, we quickly
discovered that the experience using the current full or lite modes was
far from ideal:

Full and lite modes are optimized for devices with screens 1024 pixels
wide by 768 pixels in height. Hence, much zooming or panning is
required to use these versions on the iPhone.

Earlier versions of Lotus iNotes opened many windows. This approach
isn’t ideal for the iPhone experience.

Many significant gestures that full and lite mode rely on are missing
on the iPhone: double-click, right-click, shift-click, Ctrl-click,
hover, and drag-and-drop. Both full and lite modes rely on the
double-click gesture to open documents in a view.

The amount of bandwidth consumed by full mode, particularly when the
browser cache is empty, makes it a less-than-ideal experience on
mobile devices where the bandwidth might be constrained.

The amount of script utilized by full and lite modes affects the
client performance experience. The iPhone has much more limited
caching capabilities than desktop browsers, and it enforces upper size
limits on the uncompressed responses that might be cached. Several of
the Lotus iNotes full-mode external scripts exceed this upper size
limit.

Some of the more complex things, such as div dialogs that full and
lite modes are using, seem to have problems with the mobile Safari
browser.

There were also a couple of other usage scenarios (besides narrow width
mobile devices) that were not addressed by Lotus iNotes in the past. If we
were going to introduce a new iNotes mode focused on mobile browsers, we
thought it would be an added bonus if it could also address these other
known situations:

Working within script-disabled browsers. Lotus iNotes full and lite
modes rely heavily on JavaScript™ and do not load when script is
disabled. Several competitive Internet mail offerings provide such a
script-free Basic version.

Meeting accessibility guidelines established for users with
disabilities.

This initial release of Lotus iNotes ultra-light mode is optimized for two
mobile devices, the Apple iPhone and the Apple iPod touch. As capable
browsers become the norm within newer smartphones, we anticipate that
there will be greater interest in having Lotus iNotes support for
additional mobile devices.

Another evident trend is the emergence of WebKit as the preferred browser
engine for many of these mobile device platforms. Besides mobile Safari on
the Apple devices, the Google Android platform, the Symbian S60 platform,
and the Palm webOS platform all feature WebKit-based browsers. This fact
means that Web applications that work well on the Apple iPhone and iPod
touch have a high likelihood of working well on these other mobile
browsers also.

Apple iPhone and Web
application user interface guidelines

One of our goals with ultra-light mode is to provide an experience that
feels natural on the iPhone. To provide this experience, we followed the
human interface guidelines published by Apple for iPhone Web
application development and our own user experience best practices.
Apple’s document puts forth a number of principles for designing for the
iPhone that helped us to optimize our application. These guidelines also
translate well to other real-estate constrained (for example, mobile
device) platforms. Here are some of the principles we followed when
designing the ultra-light mode UI.

Simplify wherever possible

The iNotes full and lite modes offer a fairly rich user experience. There
are often several ways to accomplish a task and many options available.
For example, in full mode, there are eight different options to reply to a
message. In ultra-light mode, we offer the two most common reply options,
and they are prominently placed on the page.

Focus on the key feature set

The primary goal of Lotus iNotes is to provide quick access to information
and actions within a user’s mail file. When designing the Lotus iNotes
ultra-light mode, we focused on the most commonly used subset of those
features: email, contacts, and calendar. This focus helped us to
prioritize our feature set and avoid diluting the effectiveness of the
user experience with too many distractions.

Don’t try to squeeze too much onto a
page

Despite its relatively high-resolution screen, the iPhone still has
significantly less screen real estate than a desktop computer. Trying to
squeeze as much as possible into a small space could make things difficult
to read, locate, and interact with. In our application, we attempted to
strike a balance between an open and uncluttered space and making the most
important information available to the user with a minimum of clicks and
context changes.

Require input only when necessary

Even with a touch screen, virtual keyboard with assistance, and 3G/WiFi
high-bandwidth support, entering information and traversing multiple Web
page screens can be cumbersome on the iPhone. To minimize this clumsiness,
we avoided unnecessary pages, prompts, and panels.

Keep key information close to the
surface

This guideline is the flip side to requiring input only when necessary. By
organizing pages and content to minimize the number of touches (or
gestures) needed to display important information, we’ve tried to keep the
application efficient and fun to use.

We believe that by following these guidelines we have built a solution well
suited for the iPhone and iPod touch devices.

Setting up to use ultra-light
mode

The steps for setting up Lotus iNotes are well documented in the Lotus
Domino administrator help documentation. Steps specifically related to the
new ultra-light mode are minimal, but there are some considerations that
you should take into account. If your intent is to have Lotus iNotes
available for secure access from the Internet, and a reverse proxy server
or VPN is part of the deployment configuration, this approach needs to be
validated with ultra-light mode from the iPhone. Lotus iNotes supports
both reverse proxies and VPNs, though sometimes configuration is required.
If a VPN solution that requires special client-side installed software is
being used, then this poses a hurdle because an iPhone-compatible version
of the VPN client is also required. Check with your VPN vendor on the
availability of such a component for the iPhone. The iPhone also has a
built-in VPN client, which might be configured to work with your
compatible VPN.

New Lotus iNotes redirector
settings for ultra-light mode

The Lotus iNotes redirector application provides both single URL access to
any user’s mail file and a custom Web login screen. Some key enhancements
were made to this application to better support ultra-light mode. First,
there are some new mobile settings that can be accessed when setting up
the application.

Figure 1. Redirector UI changes to access new mobile
settings

Clicking the Ultralite/Mobile Settings button displays the following two
settings as shown in figure 2:

The Enable Ultralite mode radio button option

The Mobile Device User Agent Keywords field

Figure 2. New mobile settings in the redirector
application

The Enable Ultralite mode radio button setting adds “ultralite mode” as one
of the login options that the user can select when login options are
enabled in the UI setup screen.

The Mobile Device User Agent Keywords setting determines when to display an
alternate login screen that is more suitable for narrow-width browsers.
The keywords specified here are sought within the HTTP user agent request
header on incoming requests. When the keyword text (for example, "ipod" or
"iphone") is found, an alternate mobile login screen is displayed. To have
this alternate login screen display for other mobile browsers, a unique
keyword to identify that alternate browser might be added to this settings
list. Although the ultra-light mode currently supports only "ipod" and
"iphone", you could use this approach to try out other mobile browsers.
For example, "android" or "series60" might be used to have this
mobile-optimized login screen show up on a device that uses the Google
Android and Symbian S60 browsers, respectively. In addition, the UI Setup
screen now also contains an additional option to remember the entered user
name within a persisted cookie. Because entering many characters is
cumbersome with smartphone keypads, this option greatly improves the
authentication procedure.

Invoking ultra-light mode

Ultra-light mode can be explicitly invoked through a new UI argument value,
dwa_ulite, when invoking the ?OpenDatabase URL. Ultra-light mode is also
automatically entered when specifically supported mobile browsers, such as
mobile Safari, are encountered or when JavaScript is disabled on a
particular browser.

Ultra-light mode UI and
features

Although the 8.5 version added support for accessing the Lotus iNotes
ultra-light mode from the Firefox desktop browser on Microsoft® Windows®,
this discussion focuses mainly on the experience on the Apple iPhone and
iPod touch. The same features available on the iPhone are available from
Firefox, except for features provided by the iPhone such as the ability to
dial the phone number in a contact entry.

Home page

The iNotes ultra-light mode home page, shown in figure 3, provides access
to Lotus Domino mail, calendar, and contacts through a user interface that
has the simple look and ease of use associated with a typical iPhone
application.

Figure 3. Home view on the device

For example, with a quick glance at the home page example in figure 3, it
is easy to see that the Inbox has seven unread messages that are waiting
to be read. The current date displays in the Day At A Glance icon. The
view available with each of the home page icons is self-evident.

Bookmarking an ultra-light page

Browser bookmarks can be created to get directly to the Lotus iNotes
ultra-light view and document pages. In addition, bookmarks can also be
placed on the iPhone home page. These bookmarks are easily identified with
a unique icon as shown in figure 4.

Figure 4. Adding a bookmark

Inbox view

Figure 5 shows what the Inbox has to offer when using ultra-light mode in
Lotus iNotes 8.5.

Figure 5. Inbox view on the device

The first thing to notice is the unread count at the top of the screen, so
users immediately know how much mail still needs to be read. This count is
updated on a page refresh or when an action is performed. Buttons are
available to compose new mail, to refresh the view to check for new
incoming messages, and to return to the previous view, in this case, the
home page.

Ultra-light shows as many as 40 messages per page in the message list,
which users can flick through and select to read. When there is more than
one page of mail, the navigation bars at the top and bottom of the view
provide previous and next buttons to move to other pages of mail and to
keep track of what page is currently displayed. The display of the message
list should be familiar to anyone who has worked with the narrow view of
either Lotus iNotes full or lite mode or the Lotus Notes client. The
message list provides many familiar view icons, aimed at providing useful
information at a quick glance. To the left there are indicators to help
identify unread mail, high-priority items, and various types of calendar
events that were received. On the right, icons indicate items marked for
follow-up action, those items already handled by forward or reply
operations, and where attachments or additional information are present.
Attention indicators also display when this feature is configured in the
Lotus iNotes preferences.

A Lotus iNotes 8.0.2 user can have a similar user experience, but without a
few of the helpful view icons (follow-up, replied and/or forwarded,
attention indicators) that are new for Lotus iNotes 8.5.

Read Message page

To make efficient use of the small screen size on mobile devices,
information in the message header is kept to a useful minimum when users
view messages in ultra-light mode. In this way, more of the actual message
content is visible on the screen. In an open message, the sender's name
and encrypted and signed indicators are always visible in the header.
Toggling the details/hide link displays additional information about who
else received the mail and the signer. See figure 6. A Lotus iNotes 8.0.2
user has the same display but without the encrypted and signed
information, which is new for the 8.5 version.

Figure 6. Read Message views

When users read a message that includes attachments, a button displays at
the top of the message body, indicating how many files are attached.
Clicking this button takes users to the attachment section at the bottom
of the message, where the name, type, and size of each attached file are
shown. See figure 7.

Figure 7. Attachment area in an open message

Clicking the indicator (>) for an attachment opens a new browser window
on the iPhone, where the content displays if the device has a viewer that
can process this type of file.

When reading messages, users have key actions available. As evident in
figure 6, there are buttons to navigate back and forth through the mail in
your Inbox, mark the message unread, delete the message, send a reply, or
forward the message. While other modes of Lotus iNotes provide many
options for Reply and Forward actions, the ultra-light mode provides a
smaller set containing the most common options. Both Reply and Reply to
All actions always include the message history and do not include
attachments; Forward always includes the attachments that came with the
message.

New Message page

In the 8.0.2 version, email addresses in messages sent from ultra-light
mode ware checked against users’ personal contact list and corporate
directory, expanded if possible, and sent out. This function has been
improved in Lotus iNotes 8.5 by the addition of a new interactive name
validation capability. This validation occurs whenever mail is sent. There
is also a validate button available to the left of the "to" field,
enabling users to explicitly check names before sending mail. See figure
8.

Figure 8. New Message view

On both validate and send, each address is compared to both personal
contacts and the public directory. If an exact match can’t be determined
for a recipient, a window displays with options for resolving the problem,
such as selecting from some similar names or reentering a value as shown
in figure 9.

Figure 9. Name validation dialog

Day At A Glance page

The Lotus iNotes ultra-light mode provides a convenient Day At A Glance
calendar view that initially displays the current day’s schedule for the
user. See figure 10.

Figure 10. Day At A Glance view

Action icons are available to navigate to the next and previous days,
return to the current day, refresh the view to see any new entries, and
return to the home page. The calendar event list that displays respects
the user’s existing Lotus Notes color settings and incorporates familiar
Lotus iNotes icons as event identifiers. Ultra-light mode also respects
the existing Lotus iNotes preference setting that controls whether
unprocessed meeting notices show up on the calendar. For example, the gray
reschedule notice in figure 10 is an example of a ghosted entry in the
calendar, which represents a reschedule meeting notice that has not been
accepted or declined yet.

Calendar events page

Ultra-light mode provides read-only access to the Lotus Domino calendar,
allowing users to view existing entries. All calendar entries show date,
time, and location information. Meeting entries also identify the chair
and include a details/hide link. Toggling the details/hide link displays
or hides additional details about who else was invited to the meeting as
shown in figure 11.

Figure 11. Open calendar entry for a meeting

Additionally for Lotus iNotes 8.5, a repeats label was added next to the
date to identify a repeating event. For unprocessed invitations displayed
in the Inbox or as a ghost in the calendar, the repeats label is an active
link that toggles between showing and hiding the actual list of repeating
dates. See figure 12.

Figure 12. Open calendar invitation for a repeating
meeting

Contacts page

The contact view in ultra-light mode displays the user’s personal contact
list from Lotus iNotes. It provides an alphabetic listing with controls to
jump to a specific letter page in the contact list as shown in figure 13.
Icons display in the contact list when a cell phone number, a business
phone number, or a work email address is available for someone. On the
iPhone, these icons are clickable links that make it easy to place a call
or compose an email from the view without having to open the entry. From
the contact view, users can create new contacts or drill down to open an
existing contact entry.

Figure 13. Contacts view on the iPhone

The open contact entry displays the name, e-mail, phone, and address
information that is available for the contact. There are also action
buttons available to edit or delete the entry. See figure 14.

Figure 14. Open Contact view

The edit fields and drop-down choices when you edit or create a new contact
are the same ones available in Lotus iNotes full mode. For convenience,
there are tabs to jump to the sections of information that can be entered
for name, e-mail, phone, and address. See figure 15.

Figure 15. Edit Contact view

While ultra-light mode does not currently support creating or editing
personal groups, users can view any existing personal group created using
Lotus iNotes full mode or the Lotus Notes client.

Accessibility and desktop
browser support

In Lotus iNotes 8.0.2, iNotes ultra-light mode is supported on the mobile
Safari browser used by the iPhone and iPod touch mobile devices. With
version 8.5, iNotes ultra-light mode added support for the Mozilla Firefox
desktop browser on Windows, with the goal of providing an accessible
solution for Lotus iNotes that complies with the standards set forth in
Section 508 of the United States Rehabilitation Act (found at 29 U.S.C.
794d). As such, ultra-light mode on the desktop is designed to function
well using keyboard-only navigation, display well when users want to use
large fonts and high-contrast modes, and be easily understood with a
screen reader.

The ultra-light mode UI is generally the same for both the device and the
desktop display. The home page view and the contact list view are two
places where page layouts were enhanced to exploit the larger screen size
available with desktop browser.

The home page on the desktop, shown in figure 16, has a different layout
than on the device.

Figure 16. Home page view on the desktop browser

The Inbox button still features an unread count (in parenthesis for the
desktop display). Views available with each of the home page buttons are
self-evident. One minor difference for the Day At A Glance icon is that
the number within the icon does not reflect the current date as it does on
the mobile device. Additional help information on access key shortcuts,
useful for screen reader usage or keyboard navigation, is available.

Desktop users also have the advantage of being able to switch to other
Lotus iNotes modes to use features not currently available with
ultra-light mode (although those other modes are not Section 508
compliant). Features not currently available in ultra-light mode include
tasks such as creating new calendar entries, handling meeting notices and
workflow, and creating group contacts.

For the contact view, shown in figure 17, the larger screen size with a
desktop browser means more information can be surfaced to the view. For
the desktop user, two additional phone icons, home phone and pager number,
can display for a contact. While these are not clickable links on the
desktop, the screen reader does speak the numbers associated with each
icon in the view.

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Dana St. Clair for her editing of multiple
versions of this article. She joined IBM in 2000 as a Principal Technical
Writer for IBM Lotus. Dana has worked on a number of documentation efforts
including Domino Administrator help. She currently writes the client and
administration documentation for Lotus iNotes and client documentation for
Lotus Notes.

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